Profiles
in Murder: An FBI Legend Dissects Killers and Their Crime
by Russell Vorpagel, Joseph Harrington
"Profiler"
Russell Vorpagel looks at the most horrific crimes in the FBI's
files. The accounts --from the former mental patient who eviscerated
his victims and drank their blood, to the middle-aged woman
found half-naked amid strewn sex toys in a burning house--are
the framework of a class taught to police officers, FBI agents,
and attorneys trying to learn how FBI profilers analyze a crime
scene and determine what sort of person did it. The techniques
used allow them to determine the age, sex, race, physical appearance,
and habits.

Dark
Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide and the Criminal Mind
by Roy Hazelwood, Stephen G. Michaud
Profiler
Roy Hazelwood reveals the twisted motives and thinking that
go into the most reprehensible crimes. He catalogs innovative
and effective techniques-investigative approaches he helped
pioneer at the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit that allow law
enforcement to construct psychological profiles of the offenders
who commit them. Hazelwood helped track down some of the most
violent criminals; in Dark Dreams: * A young woman disappears
from the store where she works. Her remains are found in a
field. * A teenager's body is found hanging in a storm sewer.
His clothes neatly folded and a stopwatch in his mouth. *
A married couple, with their toddler, pick up a female hitchhiker.
They kidnap her and hold her for 7 years keep her as a sexual
slave. The wife agreed to this inhuman arrangement in exchange
for a second child. Who was to blame? As gruesome as the crimes
are and as unsettling as the odds seem, Hazelwood proves that
the right amount of determination and logic can bring even
the most cunning and devious criminals to justice.

4-24-03, a heavily armed
14-year-old 8th-grade boy, James Sheets, known as Jimmy, shot
and killed his popular school principal, Eugene Segro, 51, inside
a crowded junior high school cafeteria, then killed himself.
He fired at least two shots with a handgun. There were 300 -
400 students in the cafeteria.

Each morning, students
are funneled into the auditorium and the cafeteria before the school
is locked down, allowing people to enter only through a buzzer system.
The school has video surveillance cameras, but no metal detectors,
Robinson said.

The shootings happened
about 15 minutes before the start of classes at the Red Lion Area
Junior High School, in York county, southeast of York, 30 miles
south-southeast of Harrisburg in southern Pennsylvania. Mechanicsburg
is just west of Harrisburg.

Segro was shot once in
the chest and Sheets was shot once in the head.

Sheets walked to within
five yards of Principal Eugene Segro, 51, and without provocation
shot him once in the chest with what one student called "a really
big silver gun."

Sheets used a second
handgun to shoot himself once in the head.

Police found 3 loaded
handguns -- a .22-caliber revolver, a .44 Magnum and a .357 Magnum.
He had taken them to school in his bookbag.

Police searched Sheets'
house and took boxes and boxes of possible evidence. He used a key
to take the guns came from his stepfather's gun safe. Police removed
a computer and boxes of other evidence from Sheets's home. They
also interviewed the boy's distraught parents. The parents will
probably not face any charges in connection with the guns.

Sheets played wide receiver
on the school football team, appeared to have many friends and was
reasonably popular. He was described as a good kid by adults and
students. "Everyone said he was a nice kid, an average kid," said
Red Lion Borough Police Chief Walt Hughes. "He was no problem."
"There was no indication that there was any dispute," said Terry
Robinson, business manager for the Red Lion school district.

Approximately 875 students
from the junior high school were taken to the senior high school
and Edgar Moore Elementary School where officials dismissed the
schools for the day at at 10 a.m.

On Feb. 2, 2001, the
same district was the site of a machete attack on a kindergarten
class at North Hopewell Winterstown Elementary School that injured
10 students, 2 teachers and a principal, whose hands were slashed.
A Tennessee man William Stankewicz, angry about his divorce and
allegations he molested his stepdaughters pleaded guilty to the
attack and was sentenced to 132 to 264 years in prison.

Police detained a boy
armed with butcher knives and a baseball bat. Staff saw him armed
with butcher knives and a baseball bat as he hurled 3 crude bombs
at the building in an attempt to empty it, one narrowly missed a
window of a room where staff were working. Staff kept him from entering
the school. The teen threw gasoline and broken glass at staff to
avoid capture, staff cornered him, and he surrendered. School officials
held the boy until police arrived and took him into custody. He
dropped 2 bags on the lawn.

Students remained in
class until about 12:45 p.m. when they were sent home so police
could inspect student's backpacks and Explosive Ordnance Detail
(EOD), a type of bomb squad from Fort Indiantown Gap in Lebanon
County, could examine the the bags left on the front lawn. He had
2 bags of Molotov cocktails, a jug of gasoline and bottles to make
more, 2 butcher knives and a baseball bat. One of the bags appeared
to contain a radio and notepads. The squad turned the backpack and
its contents over to police about 1:45 p.m. after determining no
bombs, only bomb-making materials, were inside.

A Molotov cocktail is
a glass bottle filled with gasoline and topped with a gasoline-soaked
strip of cloth wick. The contents explode when the bottle breaks.

"He was specifically
targeting three students he intended to murder," Mechanicsburg said
Police Chief David Spotts. "The fire-bomb attack was a diversionary
tactic intended to start a fire and force the evacuation of the
school."

He was taking classes
at the high school at night because he was considered a troubled
youth. Students said he has "issues with school" and was on suspension.

Mechanicsburg Police
said the student had been having trouble in school, and was subjected
to "regular and intense verbal abuse," by other students and that
may have motivated his actions.

No one was injured and
there was minimal damage to the school building.

The boy, who was not
identified, confessed to police and has been placed in a juvenile
detention facility. He allegedly told police he planned to kill
3 students and wanted to use the fire as a diversionary tactic.
The boy was been charged in juvenile court with attempted homicide,
aggravated assault, attempted arson, causing or risking a catastrophe,
possession of implements of crime and attempted criminal vandalism.
Additional charges may be pending. Spotts said the teen has been
placed in a juvenile detention facility. A search of the teen's
home uncovered evidence related to the incident. Police would not
elaborate. "All indications are that the boy was acting alone, and
that no one knew what he was planning to do," Spotts said.

Rumors had been circulating
that another student planned an attack at the school on the 21st,
a day after the April 20 anniversary of the Columbine shootings
in Littleton, Colo., in 1999. The rumors were false. Students said
that on Monday there was an issue involving a student with a "hit
list."

The
Jonesboro shootings A year later -- How the community has coped
and changed since shots rang out as schoolchildren and teachers
gathered outside Jonesboro's Westside Middle School after a fire
alarm went off Tuesday, March 24,1998. Four girls and a teacher
died. Two boys, one 13 years old and the other 11, are accused in
the killings.

Jonesboro
Arkansas Boys Held as Prosecutors Weigh Options -- Mitchell
Johnson, 13, and his cousin, Andrew Golden, 11, were being held
in juvenile detention at the Craighead County, AK, jail, facing
murder charges after bullets fired outside a middle school on Tuesday
killed four girls and one teacher, wounded 10 other people and plunged
this small city into despair. The ages of the two suspects could
result in sentences of just a few years in juvenile detention. Just
before a judge remanded 14-year-old Mitchell
Johnson and 12-year-old Andrew Golden into juvenile detention
for a school shooting spree that killed a teacher and four little
girls, the older boy offered a courtroom filled with their relatives
a childlike excuse. He said he did not mean to do it. "I thought
we were going to shoot over their heads," said the quavering, trembling
Mitchell, who pleaded guilty in an adjudication hearing -- the juvenile
court equivalent of a trial -- in the Craighead County Courthouse
Tuesday. "We didn't think anybody was going to get hurt."

The
youth homicides in rural schools puzzles psychologists -- Homicidal
youth violence has moved from America’s inner-city neighborhoods
to rural and suburban areas. James Garbarino, Ph.D., Cornell University
professor, characterizes the outbreak of bizarre, fatal shootings.
'What typically happens with epidemics is they first take hold in
the most vulnerable parts of the population, and then move out to
the more general population.' Garbarino is interviewing boys jailed
for murder and other violent acts. 'It’s quite possible that this
surge of school-based shootings in small towns, in rural and suburban
areas, is a kind of second stage of epidemic violence among our
youth,' he says.

Recent shootings aroused
concerns about school
safety and gun control, fears that were still very real for
many Americans a year later. Just before the 1 year anniversary
of the Columbine shooting, a Wall Street Journal NBC News poll found
that 70% of Americans believed such a shooting could occur at a
school in their own community.

The
Angry Child: Regaining Control When Your Child Is Out of Control
by Timothy Murphy, Loriann Hoff Oberlin
When
a child's anger threatens to jeopardize school and social life and
introduces strain into the family dynamics, it's time for a parent
to ask: When is angry too angry? Child psychologist Dr. Tim
Murphy has addressed this very question with both the causes and
the repercussions of childhood anger and to devise effective strategies
for defusing the time bomb. Whether it's a toddler tantrum, a grade-schooler
unable to make friends, or a preteen who greets every adult request
with antagonism, parents of angry children are baffled by the depth
and the root of their child's unhappiness. With simple, techniques,
it is possible to help an angry child develop new approaches for
coping with explosive situations. Identifying the ten characteristics
of an angry child, Murphy provides examples to guide children to
more appropriate responses. Murphy alerts readers to parenting styles
that work best for volatile children, explaining how a parent's
behavior can escalate a child's meltdowns. He pinpoints when anger
moves from a normal emotional expression to an extreme one, indicative
of a larger problem. Murphy offers advice on situations in which
an angry child's temper is most likely to flare. Dr. Murphy offers
answers and hope for the families and educators of unhappy children
of all ages.